Every few days I get a call some Republican Party office-holder complaining about the pressure the party is putting on anyone who even thinks of opposing party favorite Chris Christie in the gubernatorial primary.

That's politics, I tell them. You play to your strengths. And Christie's strength is in the party structure. He's hoping that the county organizations can keep an election from breaking out this June.

Because in a real contest, Christie could be in trouble, if history is any indication. The party's base has a habit of rejecting politicians who are insufficiently conservative, even when those politicians were much better situated than is Christie.

He is a consensus front-runner, but Republican voters have dispatched in primaries two front-runners who were not only incumbents, but who had excellent chances for re-election.

Not many people recall it, but the Reagan revolution actually began with such a primary. In 1978, a young conservative by the name of Jeffrey Bell took on U.S. Sen. Clifford Case. Case had solid party support, so solid that he didn't bother campaigning. He woke up on the first Wednesday in June as an ex-candidate.

AP Photo/Mike DererRepublican Christopher Christie, who is running for governor of New Jersey.

The Democrats were even more shocked than the Republicans. They couldn't believe the party faithful would do in a shoo-in. But conservative Republicans tend to put principle over pragmatism. And Bell was not only principled, he was a brilliant guy full of new ideas, particularly in the area of economics.

Some of those concepts seem to have taken hold with the man who went on to beat him in the general election that fall. As a senator, Bill Bradley adopted many free-market ideas on taxation similar to those aired by Bell in his losing campaign. Bradley later went on to help rewrite the tax code after Reagan won the presidency two years later.

So the exercise was not a total loss. The party leaders may have been disappointed, but the conservative base had made its point.

That point was made even more forcefully in a 1973 race that had numerous parallels to this year's race. Gov. William Cahill was a moderate Republican who was popular with the general public. But he was seen as insufficiently conservative because he favored such concepts as an income tax. In 1973, a hard-core right-wing congressman named Charles Sandman took him on in the primary.

That primary was hotly contested, but the result was the same. Even though the Democrats and most members of the media thought the Republicans would be crazy to replace a popular politician with a rabid right-winger, the right-winger won the primary.

On his way out office, Cahill got revenge on the right by appointing former Democratic Gov. Richard Hughes chief justice of the Supreme Court. That betrayal is bitterly recalled by right-wingers to this day, with good reason. Hughes teamed up with the eventual winner that year, Brendan Byrne, to give us the income tax that Cahill had wanted by issuing edicts in the area of school funding. The successor to that case is still being fought in the courts at this moment.

The Cahill-Sandman fight was remarkably similar to the current dust-up between Christie and his main challenger, former Bogota mayor Steve Lonegan. Like Cahill, Christie rose to prominence as a prosecutor. Like Sandman, Lonegan is an arch-conservative who never misses a chance to throw red meat to the right wing.

So if this becomes a head-to-head fight, Christie will be in the same position as Cahill and Case were. Worse for him, the party's base has grown more conservative over the years and the party organization has grown weaker.

Christie's strongest argument is that he's more likely to win in November. That argument is buttressed by the losses of Sandman, Bell and later Bret Schundler in the 2001 governor's race.

But that's not the argument the party needs to be having. The real problem for the GOP is that under the current tax structure and with the current Supreme Court, it's impossible to reward people for voting Republican. Thanks to that ingenious income-redistribution scheme that is Cahill's legacy, the money keeps flowing from the suburbs to the cities no matter who's governor.

Cahill may have thought he was getting revenge on the right, but he ended up ruining the Republican Party. Pre-Cahill, the Republicans could reward suburban and rural voters for electing them. Ever since, the urban Democrats win even when they lose.

So while I appreciate the strategy of the Christie campaign, I hope it doesn't succeed. When it comes to party officials, he can twist all the arms he wants. But when it comes to voters, a bit more persuasion would be in order. Christie needs to elucidate just what he would do if elected to reverse the legacy of Cahill -- unless he wants to wind up like him.